Coinbase will add Ethereum Classic to its exchange ‘in the coming months’

Coinbase may be one of the most-lauded crypto exchanges, but it supports just four coins right now which is far fewer than most others. That’s about to change a little after it announced plans to add Ethereum Classic (ETC), a fork of the Ethereum crypto token, to its service “in the coming months.”

Ethereum Classic was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.

A date for the introduction of ETC will be communicated via Coinbase blog and Twitter account in due course, according to the company.

Coinbase is announcing its intention to list Ethereum Classic ahead of time so that it can test integrations as part of its new policy on adding new tokens, but that move is also in response to concerns that around inside trading when the exchange added Bitcoin Cash last December.

Indeed, the price hit a high of $8,500 on Coinbase and its GDAX service for professional investors, which was almost three times higher than the $3,500 price on all other exchanges. That led to speculation that Coinbase staff and insiders could have profited by buying BCH on other exchanges in the knowledge that it was about to be added to Coinbase, thus spiking the price significantly.

This time around with ETC, Coinbase will hope that its statement of intent to list the token further down the line will avoid the potential for foul play.

This listing could be the first of many for Coinbase this year.

In today’s announcement, the company again reiterated its intention to add support for ERC20 tokens — the type that are generated by an ICO — and Bitcoin forks in the future.

More generally 2018 is seemingly a year for growth and development at Coinbase. Beyond hiring Srinivasan as its first CTO through the acquisition of his startup Earn.com, the firm has introduced an investment arm and begun doing deals.